Just want to voice my disappointment at this reaction. There is a very real problem in Elite, it's the end game ships and their prices. The prices are so high they require very high paying jobs, or a years worth of work to achieve. Once one of those lovely ships is owned, the rebuy can be north of 30 million. Depending on job activity, that can be days, or even weeks to recover.
In the early design stages of this game there was talk of high-tier ships not being affordable by the average player until three or four
years into the mythical ten-year plan, that's how expensive they were meant to be. The idea that some players might play this game for its entire lifespan and never see the inside of anything larger than a Python was a serious consideration. But the big ships were envisioned as haulers, not brawlers. Expensive to own and operate, capable of hugely profitable trade runs but difficult to defend against organised piracy from smaller, more agile ships, and where the outcome of a bad encounter might be an expensive repair job and a loss of a fair chunk of the cargo.
None of that happened. Instead the big multi-purpose ships with their multitude of SCB / HRP slots and larger hardpoints became the weapons of choice for PVP, which meant that everyone who wanted to be PVP viable had to get on that train. The subtleties of PVP piracy never materialised, so instead of disabling someone's ship and stealing cargo, the goal became "sending them to the Rebuy Screen." Then Engineers came along and made the divide worse. Instead of "end game" (hate that term) ships, or luxury vessels one might dedicate an entire career to owning, A-rated and Engineered Anacondas and later Corvettes became must-haves for certain play styles, hence the need for millions of credits in outfitting and rebuys.
If you play a certain way,
ED encourages -- more or less requires -- you to make as many credits in as short a space of time as possible in order to be competitive. Until that is resolved (and I'm not sure it ever can be now) edge cases like Smeaton are always going to be jumped on, and FD are going to be fighting individual fires on and off until the day the servers go quiet.
Disclaimer: I'm not a PVP player, but I did use Smeaton for a 100 million credit boost so I could get a trade Cutter a couple of weeks ahead of schedule. I did a total of five or six runs including initial reputation build. Admittedly some were not wholly efficient, with a few empty cabins on the early runs. Nonetheless it bored me to tears. If I'd had to grind the full 300 million for the Cutter and outfitting I don't think I could have done it. I've seen posts from people claiming to have made 10
billion credits or more at Smeaton. Assuming they need that as a PVP war chest, and not just because they want to be digital Scrooge McDucks, it's heartbreaking. I can't imagine having to grind an arguable exploit for that amount of time just to feel viable in my chosen career. I've never been happier to be a PVE / exploration player.